Glencore

Glencore plc is an Anglo–Swiss multinational commodity trading and mining company headquartered in Baar, Switzerland and with its registered office in Saint Helier, Jersey. The company was created through a merger of Glencore with Xstrata in May 2013. As of 2013, it ranked twelfth in the Fortune Global 500 list of the world’s largest companies.

As Glencore, the company was already one of the world’s leading integrated producers and marketers of commodities. It was the largest company in Switzerland and the world’s largest commodities trading company. Glencore had a number of production facilities all around the world and supplied metals, minerals, crude oil, oil products, coal, natural gas and agricultural products to international customers in the automotive, power generation, steel production and food processing industries. (Source: Wikipedia)

Controversies associated with Glencore include:

In April 2012, Glencore appeared in the BBC Panorama investigation Billionaires Behaving Badly? faced with charges that its copper refinery at Luilu in Katanga province in Congo was dumping raw acid in a nearby river.

The NGO Global Witness has been investigating how two major international mining companies – Glencore and ENRC – are linked to the controversial secret sales of prize mining assets in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Between 2010 and 2012, the Congolese state sold off major mining concessions in secret and at prices steeply below market value, losing out on at least $1.36 billion in the process – equivalent to twice the country’s health and education budgets combined. Rather than the state collecting most of the profits from these deals, the bulk of the money instead went to a series of offshore companies.